


Danger Nights

by LockedOnJohn



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Natasha Feels, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha-centric, Nightmares, Reference to the Winter Soldier, references to Natasha's past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-29
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-29 20:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6392782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LockedOnJohn/pseuds/LockedOnJohn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can take the girl out of the nightmare, but you can't take the nightmare out of the girl</p>
            </blockquote>





	Danger Nights

Natasha doesn’t ask for the nightmares, but that doesn’t stop them from coming.

Once upon a time, a little girl with Natasha’s face and hair and name didn’t ask to become a nightmare, but that didn’t stop him from making her one.

She dreams of red. First it is a woman's hair, brilliant like fire and waving in the breeze like the untamed flicker of a candle. The color becomes deeper and the tendrils move slower and then they fall to the woman's face and begin to drip. She screams, and blood flows to the ground and pools at her feet. Sometimes the blood drowns her, but sometimes she breathes it in until the tang of iron wraps around her throat like a chain and chokes her into consciousness. Tears never fall, but they don’t have to.

It’s those nights that she clutches the sheets like the hem of her mother’s dress (she can’t remember her mother or if she wore dresses) and bites her lip raw.

When alone, she paces like a wolf in a cage, and she is sure that she would rather grind her teeth to the gum on the bars than watch herself waste away. On a cold winter night, she had watched a wolf gnaw away its own paw to free itself from a trap. The memory only sparks twinges of jealousy.

Sometimes she wants to rip apart her own seams, angry at the betrayal of her body and mind. She supposes she never claimed to be fixed, but she also never claimed to be broken. She is certainly not whole, but she doesn’t think she ever had the chance to be.

A man with a metal arm once said “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” The expression sounded strange, so she asks:

“But what if it was never whole?” She asks, and asks, and asks until they hit her and tell her “Little girls like you were not meant to be whole. Be grateful you can never be broken.”

Natasha wishes she could be broken. She reckons being broken is the most human feeling imaginable. She pounds at the cage, whole enough to be stuck behind the bars, but not incomplete enough to slip through them. She imagines that if she were a million tiny broken pieces she would slip between them like dust.

Sometimes she sees faces, sometimes she hears voices, sometimes her mind flashes with images of mirrored rooms and ballet shoes, but she knows she was never actually a dancer. So why can she do a perfect pirouette? Why does she choke back sobs when she spins?

Clint calls them “danger nights.” Natasha calls them nothing, because she has no name for the intensity of the flashbacks and the nightmares and the pain. She has no words for the times she’s thrown a knife or punched a wall in semiconscious distress following a memory. She has no words for the arms that wrap around her while her lips quiver and her senses vacate and her eyes glaze over and she’s back in Russia and she’s nine and she’s killed a man and she’s ballerina and then she’s not. 

Sometimes when he holds her she feels her edges begin to melt into his, but she quickly extinguishes the feeling. _She was not meant to be whole_ , a voice tells her. _She is grateful she can never be broken_. 

Sometimes when Clint is gone and she’s about to collapse into herself, she climbs to the roof and looks at the city. She steps onto the ledge and takes in a deep breath. She raises her arms in front of herself, slowly and delicately. Then she lifts one foot to her opposite knee and spins.

 _Natasha_ is not a ballerina, but _whoever was_  is whole.

She spins until she can’t hear the voices, until she can’t see the faces, and until the tears do come. Because sometimes they come, but only by slipping through the cracks of the broken.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I always imagine Natasha having difficult days, and seeing as she's led a life of near-continuous trauma, I often try to see how she would deal with a breakdown. I imagine she's usually quite good at coping (because she has to be, really), but there are times where her past manifests itself and the feelings are out of her control. I would like the think that Clint does a good job of being there for her. 
> 
> Review, leave a kudos, do whatever you want!  
> Have a good one!


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